We first saw the intriguing new Lytro technology presented in 2011 when Lytro CEO Ren NG wrote a thesis on the invention. These cameras store enough information to accurately let you focus AFTER you have taken the picture. It’s brain twisting, but ingenious and now the first device by company Pelican Imaging is making its appearance in the form of Smart Phones.

Basically the idea of the so called light-field technology is that depth of field information is stored by taking a picture with arrays of pixels instead of single pixels.
The resulting directional information can help a computer (or smart phone for that matter) calculate depth of field information after the shot has been taken.

Focus on any subject, change focus after you take the photo, capture linear measurements, scale and segment your images, all on any device.

Imagine the possibilities for video: No more focus pulling, do it all in post, accurately. It seems like it’s only a question of time before the first video camera that stores depth information will appear and indie filmmakers should be looking forward to that moment.
Pelican Imaging’s VP Paul Gallagher says that soon the device will be capable of both 3-D and video imaging.

But everything is in focus anyway with the lenses on smartphones. I’d rather they focus on the parallax-based, dual lens depth-of-field simulation that Samsung was developing a few years ago.

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May 2, 2013 20:10

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PeterK

Ahh I wondered how this worked but I assume (given the size of those lenses) the sensors are so small that the depth of field is no where that shallow… unless it always take a completely out of focus image every time and uses that image as the background for all photos. That should work, I wonder how this would work for video.

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May 3, 2013 07:26

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